


The Quiet Sounds

by rallyonward



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Family, Family Drama, Gen, Guilt, I have a lot of theories, Mentions of Kylo Ren, Silence, Training, and all of them are sad, background memory alteration, sorry Rey sorry, the Force and how to abuse it, vague mentions of Leia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-30
Updated: 2016-01-30
Packaged: 2018-05-17 06:50:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5858617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rallyonward/pseuds/rallyonward
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey is training with the master. That's what this is supposed to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Quiet Sounds

The master ignored her as they sat beside the fire. 

He didn’t like lanterns; he didn’t like much of what Rey considered to be basic tools for living. The fire they sat around now was made from turf, burning low, and it smelled nothing like the desert. Rey wasn’t sure if that was comforting or not. The smoke blended with the ocean air, the wet twist of wind that had crept close to her skin and, from the moment Master Luke had taken his -- her --  _his_ lightsaber, had cradled her in a damp and unending hold.

She had not realized how much she thirsted until she had come to join the master.

***

“You don’t talk much,” Rey said. The master, seated on a shelf of rock, flicked his eyes up at her and then went back to looking out across the waters. Rey tugged at the edges of her shirt, folded the outer seam of her trousers between thumb and finger.

Overhead, a bird cried out. Rey watched it dive, and said, “Is this a lesson?”

The master didn’t break his silence, didn’t smile, didn’t look at her again. He only watched the ocean, his mechanical hand clicking as it went through its recalibration sequence.

***

The master slept in a round stone hut set against the boulders. There weren’t windows so much as larger cracks between the rocks – big enough for her to see the light from the fire he sometimes burned inside, but not so big that she could see the master himself. 

Rey slept in the emergency tent that someone – Chewie, probably, though it might have been Solo himself, for a different time, a different mission – had placed in the pack she’d carried up the mountaintop. It was bright yellow, a blot against the wide blue, white, and green that surrounded them, and every morning she packed it up as soon as she woke so as to avoid the look of it as she… did whatever she did here.

Waited, mostly.

***

If she was very quiet, she could watch him fight.

It happened in the night sometimes. She’d wake up, the air tingling with an electric snap ( _stars_ she missed the sound of power, engines, robots chittering at her and one another), and if she was careful, more silent than a girl on Jakku could have every afforded to be, she could sit at the front of her tent and watch the master as he went through the practiced swordplay of a saber dance.

The light of the saber would throw washes of blue over him, first hiding his eyes in shadow and then illuminating them so brightly Rey could see how he barely looked at the air in front of him, barely seemed to acknowledge that he was moving at all. It was like he was dreaming of something else entirely, and like Rey was dreaming him.

He would dance for hours. She always fell asleep again before he was finished.

***

He must have food. Not even a Jedi knight could live off air. Whether he had food or not, he didn’t share it with her. She never saw him eat.

It meant that quite regularly she would have to leave his side and trek down the mountain again just so she could spend yet more days digging small creatures out of the rocky tide pools and eating them over her own tiny turf fires. She didn’t know how to feel about the whole process: guilt for not bringing the master any part of her spoils; anger that it was necessary she do this in the first place; a squirming ball of fear at the bottom of her stomach that said he might not be there when she went back.

She never saw Chewie, though he had to have still  been there. The Falcon hadn’t left. She wondered if he spent time thinking about her, about Solo, about the way the ship cut through the air like a knife. She didn’t visit him because that didn’t seem to be the point of whatever this was. She tried not to think about how selfish that made her feel.

Today, though, and she didn’t know why today was different from yesterday, or the day before, or the week before, today she’d snuck back – just to see someone other than the master, hear anything besides silence and the rush of wind – and there was no one there.

There were, however, two mugs of stim still steaming gently on the chessboard. 

Two.

Rey climbed back up the mountain and decided to settle on ‘angry’ for a while.

***

“Is it that you can’t talk,” she said that night, the fire between them, his mechanical hand clicking in the darkness, “or that you just don’t want to talk to me.”

He didn’t rise to the bait. The master simply watched her. He looked tired.

And then, as if he had been speaking this entire time and Rey would instantly know what he was talking about, the master said, “You’re very much like him.” His voice was soft, but it crackled underneath. “I had hoped you wouldn’t be.”

He thought she was like Kylo Ren.

She forced herself to stay still, to keep her eyes on his. Perhaps Master Luke was just another kind of scavenge lord, the sort who would do what it took to keep her in her place. Fine. She had survived the worst of them, and younger than this white-hair could even dream. She would survive him too.

“You don’t know me,” she said, “and you can’t know me. You didn’t know I existed until I came here, and if you think you can just–”

He stood, and she faltered.

“There are always two,” he said. “I did what I could to stop the cycle. And yet– here you are.” He smiled, or at least, stretched his mouth. “Do you know how hard it is to convince a mother that she only has one child?”

Rey did not move.

“Twins run in the family,” the master said, “and I am afraid now of what might run in our blood.” He walked, then, back to his hut, and she did not see a light.

***

Rey watched the fire until it burned to the ground.

***

Then she waited on the stone shelf, sun rising over blue and endless ocean, until the master returned again.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [tumblr](http://rallyonward.tumblr.com).


End file.
